First of 13 parts
This series is dedicated to a) examining the problem of vote fraud; b) considering a possible solution; and c) further examining how improved election integrity could be a tonic for the overall political process.
A Crisis of Confidence
The issue of vote fraud and bad balloting continues to vex the American electorate—at least the right half. A June 2023 poll by the Associated Press/NORC found that just 44 percent of Americans have “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence in election integrity. By contrast, 28 percent said they had a “moderate amount” of confidence, while 27 percent said “only a little” or “none at all.” To be sure, that poll was skewed partisanly: Only 22 percent of Republicans expressed confidence, compared to 71 percent of Democrats.
Those numbers could change, depending on who wins in 2024, and yet it seems safe to predict that whatever the results next year, big chunks of the country will view them as illegitimate. And while the perception of illegitimacy might not be the chief concern of the winner, it should be concerning to the country. And so we should explore ways to restore legitimacy—that’s the point of this 13-part series.
Arizona Agonistes
We can illustrate the concern by looking at what’s happened in Arizona. The GOP candidate for governor in 2022, Kari Lake, lost the election, according to the state’s secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, by 17,117 votes, out of more than 2.5 million ballots cast. In January 2023, the Democratic nominee—the same Katie Hobbs—was sworn in as the state’s 24th governor.
For her part, Lake has not conceded. She is active on Twitter, as is her “war room"; both churn out accusations of voting irregularities. Lake says that the 2022 balloting was “botched,” that it was “incompetency 101,” that it was run like a “banana republic." And she has filed lawsuits, and more lawsuits. Journalistic allies, too, have weighed in. For instance, The Federalist cites numerous breaches in the “chain of custody” of ballots, as they were moved from voters to tabulators. In a close election, any such breach could invalidate the results ethically, if not legally.
These claims, serious as they might be, will not change the outcome of the Arizona election. Still, they are worth examining with an eye to future elections. Interestingly, Lake, a strong supporter of Donald Trump, has been on the bad-balloting trail for a long time. Back in October 2022, in the midst of her own gubernatorial campaign, she was challenged by CNN to cite evidence of vote fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Lake came right back: “Well, there’s plenty of evidence. We had 740,000 ballots with no chain of custody. Those ballots shouldn't have been counted.” Needless to say, at the time, The Washington Post was horrified at Lake’s assertion. Yet in the midst of denouncing Lake for making “false claims,” and “seeding doubt,” the Post included this admission about vote-counting in Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa: “officials acknowledge that a fifth of the forms documenting the transfer of drop-box ballots had incomplete information, including missing signatures.” We can note that Maricopa County accounts for nearly two-thirds of the Grand Canyon State’s population.
In October 2022, Trump’s political operation released a 14-page memo summarizing his overall case on vote fraud in 2020; the document included two pages on Arizona; here’s one item: “A study of early ballot envelope signatures identified 229,430 mismatched signatures in Maricopa County”—that is, dubious ballots totaling nearly 20 times Trump’s state margin of defeat.
So when Lake says, about her own election, “53% of the polling locations didn’t work on election day,” that squares at least somewhat with election-day news reports about vote-problems in Maricopa, as well as elsewhere. Indeed, as recently as September 19, Lake was still making investigation-worthy arguments in court filings.
It was, after all, a close election: Hobbs’ lead over Lake amounted to just six-tenths of one percent. Interestingly, seven cases from Arizona in 2022 feature in the Heritage Foundations’s vote-fraud database; maintained by widely published election expert Hans von Spakovksky.
So now come some more allegations, including about Arizona, in the form of September 18 tweets from Rasmussen:
Arizona: Preliminary AZ Senate Forensic Ballot Audit Findings - over 200,000 “non-conforming” 2020 ballots
Georgia: Court claim total of “non-conforming" 2020 ballots still locked up - “nearly 150,000.”
Arizona: 2020 Biden “win” margin - 10,457 “votes”
Georgia: 2020 Biden “win” margin - 11,779 ‘votes’
Rasmussen concludes: “Get-Out-The-Vote efforts, early voting, ballot chasing, political rallies and traditional political advertising are all useless if there is an alternative source of fabricated ‘votes.’” That’s certainly a stark way of putting the matter. And there was more from Rasmussen: “Only 1 official ballot paper type was approved in Maricopa County AZ for all 2020 election counted ballots, yet 10 types were discovered by voter-volunteers amounting to over 200,000 ‘non-conforming’ ballots that were all counted in a race Joe Biden ‘won’ by far far less.”
Do these add up to substantive allegations? About the only thing we know for sure is that the U.S. Department of Justice, supposedly the watchdog of national election integrity, will not be interested.
Does the GOP have a robust plan for ballot security in 2024? We’ll have to see. But it is interesting that Trump himself seems to be more forceful in identifying the problem than in pointing to a solution. In August 2023, he told Tucker Carlson, “We got many more votes in today than we did in '16, but the election was rigged. It was a rigged election. And with COVID, they used COVID to cheat and a lot of different things.” The following month, speaking to Megyn Kelly, Trump added, “They used Covid to cheat, they cheat anyway. . . . throw they votes out . . . I believe they send in fake ballots.” Trump has made such allegations, in fact, many time in the past three years.
We can observe that while cheating and fraud are real, there are the myriad issues of identification, ballot security, proper counting—all of which fall into the gray zone of ambiguity, depending on the good faith (or bad faith) of the actors. For instance, New York State’s determination to facilitate voting by mail has been hit with pushback from Republicans, who call it an “unconstitutional law to make voting less secure for political gain.”
In addition, there’s the emerging trend of automatic voter registration (ARV) as just enacted by the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania. Is this a good idea? Former Democratic president and Barack Obama is convinced it is. But conservative activist Steve Moore describes, critically, how ARV works out in practice:
Pennsylvania joins almost two dozen states — almost all of them Blue — that have automatic registration. People are automatically added to the rolls whenever they have contact with certain state agencies, including unemployment offices and welfare agencies. Sign up for food stamps and the government gives you a ballot.
In other words, voting and politicization become inextricably tied up in social welfare. And so it seems that the Cloward-Piven Strategy is edging closer to reality. Is this what Republicans want? Is this what the country should want? And Trump weighed in, too:
Pressure Points
To help get us our arms around the overall topic of ballots and ballot integrity, we might consider some numbers illustrating the sheer immensity of American elections: According to the Election Assistance Commission, a federal agency, “During the 2016 elections, local election officials operated 116,990 polling places, including 8,616 early voting locations, across the country. These polling sites were operated by 917,694 poll workers.” So that’s a lot of nodes, or pressure points, right there, any one of which could potentially fail, either by commission or omission.
We can add, now, the tens of millions of mailed ballots—such that every home, every dropbox and mailbox, is a new node—so the number of points of potential vulnerability swells into the hundreds of millions. Even if we assume the best of faith, it’s hard to see how to keep track of all that. In November 2022, Trump wrote on his Truth Social website, in all caps, “YOU CAN NEVER HAVE FAIR & FREE ELECTIONS WITH MAIL-IN BALLOTS — NEVER, NEVER, NEVER. WON’T AND CAN’T HAPPEN!!!”
Yet mail-in ballots are here to say. Forty-six percent of voters voted by mail in 2020. And while “only” 33 percent did so in 2022, another 25 percent voted early, which means that barely more than two-fifths voted in the “traditional” way, showing up at the polls on Tuesday. Most 2022 mail voters returned their ballot by U.S. mail, but about one-third returned it to a vote center or ballot dropbox. So it’s a new world, with all the questions and mysteries inherent to a new world.
Moreover, down the road is an even newer world, electronic voting. Republicans might hate the idea that Silicon Valley will be more involved, but that doesn’t mean that Democrats won’t do it, starting in, say, California. So we could see a split-screen future: blue states stay with mail-in ballots, and perhaps move to e-voting, while red states stick with paper. We can all have opinions on this prospect, but maybe it’s best to keep a federalist perspective: This might have been what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis had in mind when he wrote, back in 1932, of the states as “laboratories of democracy.”
Of course, many will argue that the solidity and tangibility of a paper ballot is reassuring. And yet ballots of any kind still need to be counted—159,633,396 were cast in the 2020 presidential election—and that’ll take some electronics. And with that automation in the tallying, so enters the dragon of electro-uncertainty.
Hacking
As we chew on the reality of this electro-uncertainty, we might consider the situation today: If you vote, and your vote becomes a byte of electronic data, as it must, of course it can be hacked or otherwise mulcted. That’s what happens all the time to electronic data: It gets hacked. Wikipedia keeps an ever-growing list of data breaches, affecting billions of files and people. Of course, the government is not immune: One notorious victim was the Office of Personnel Management; as one official put it in 2015, “We believe that the Central Personnel Data File was the targeted database, and that the hackers are now in possession of all personnel data for every federal employee, every federal retiree, and up to one million former federal employees.” There’ve been many hacks since, as well as related snafus. For instance, just last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that it had lost many public comments on proposed new rules—and so it would re-open the comment window. (Better luck this time, commenters!) Additionally, the categories of “hack” and “snafu” don’t include situations where a disgruntled or treacherous worker simply steals the beans, as was the case with now-Russian citizen Edward Snowden.
So hacking is as plain as the pixel on your screen—and just as fast moving: If you rely on an electronic activity, somebody, somewhere, can mess with it. And quite possibly, do so without leaving any trace. Perhaps most urgently, if voting is anonymous, then there’s no way to do a true forensic audit, because the vote has been disconnected from the voter.
One might wonder: Could blockchain make things better? After all, blockchain touts itself as guaranteeing both privacy and security. But here’s a newsflash that shouldn’t count as news: Blockchain and the related crypto can’t guarantee either. They, too, can be hacked. And of course, as the case of Sam Bankman-Fried at FTX shows us, outright fraud, on a mega scale, is also possible. It seems that for every smart person trying to figure out how to keep data secure, there’s another smart person trying to figure out how to make it insecure.
So that’s what we’re up against as we strive to keep our elections honest.
Next: The Quest for Legitimacy in Elections
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